A portrait of President Donald Trump exists somewhere in former President George W. Bush’s studio, and journalist Jacob Weisberg says no one is allowed near it. Bush has “painted a really ugly picture of Trump, which he won’t show to anybody,” Weisberg said in an interview with New York magazine’s Intelligencer, reported on September 15, 2026.
The remark came in a conversation with Michael Calderone, deputy editor of Intelligencer, about Weisberg’s book “Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era,” which Penguin Press published September 15. Weisberg built the “Bushisms” series around Bush’s verbal stumbles in office. He now faults the only living former Republican president for his silence, arguing that Bush has done too little to confront Trump — and profiling him as one of the book’s eight subjects.
Readers got the Bush chapter before they got the book. The New Yorker ran an excerpt on September 1 under the title “George W. Bush’s Code Of Silence,” ahead of publication.
Art Therapy in the Post-Presidency
Painting became Bush’s pursuit once he left the White House, and in Weisberg’s telling the brush now does the job a microphone would. “He’s expressing all of his feelings through painting, this kind of art therapy,” Weisberg said. Bush paints wounded veterans and immigrants, he said — a way of engaging with politics without ever stating his views explicitly.
Weisberg likened the hidden Trump portrait to “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The canvases, in his reading, hold what Bush actually thinks, since nothing he has said out loud does. Weisberg noted that Trump’s policies have drawn occasional comment from other former presidents, and Bush had the same opening and the same obligation — but he will not say Trump’s name. He hides instead, Weisberg said, behind the notion that former presidents must remove themselves entirely from commenting. Bush’s rapport with his Democratic counterparts, ideological differences aside, appears far warmer than anything he has with Trump.
Eight Collaborators, From McConnell to Bezos
Weisberg casts the eight public figures he profiles as collaborators who helped return Trump to power and entrench him there. Among them are former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts and the president of Dartmouth, with the cast drawn from law firms, universities, courts and Congress.
Senators, 67 of the 100 of them, had to vote to convict at Trump’s second impeachment trial, which followed the January 6 attack; that two-thirds majority would in turn have opened the way to a separate majority vote barring him from future office. Senators came in 57 to 43, short of the bar. McConnell kept the Senate out of session until after Joe Biden was sworn in, and his own vote was to acquit, even as he called Trump “practically and morally responsible” for provoking the day’s events and pointed to the criminal justice system as the proper venue. Roberts, roughly 40 months afterward, authored the majority opinion that gave former presidents absolute immunity for their core constitutional powers and at least presumptive immunity for other official acts. Multiple prosecutions collapsed as a result, and Weisberg sharply criticizes the ruling.
The law firm Paul Weiss and its then chairman, Brad Karp, open the book. The president targeted the firm, and in March 2025 Karp signed on to a deal whose terms included $40 million worth of pro bono representation for causes Trump backs — a bargain Weisberg says no law firm should have struck. The chairmanship went in February 2026, when Karp resigned it, though he remains a partner. Also profiled are Megyn Kelly and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Kelly challenged Trump over his history of misogyny as the 2016 election cycle began, then endorsed him in 2024 as what she called a protector of women; Bezos killed the Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris that same year, in 2024, and overhauled the paper’s Opinion section. Weisberg says his aim is to understand these choices rather than simply condemn them.
In a broadcast interview aired September 14, Weisberg drew a line around what he means by the word in his title, telling NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that the failing he describes is a specific kind. “I’m talking about civic cowardice,” he said. His targets are not people who “oppose Trump’s politics,” he said, but people who failed to push back on what he called “Trump’s dictatorial behavior, his governing by emergency decree and executive order.” Inskeep raised the book’s reach with him, noting, “you also have a university president, the president of Dartmouth.”
Trump’s History With Unflattering Portraits
Unflattering likenesses have irritated Trump before. He went after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Truth Social in March 2025 because a portrait of himself hung in the state Capitol next to those of other presidents, and he complained that the image had been “purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.” The same artist, Sarah Boardman, painted former President Obama, Trump wrote, “and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst.” He would rather have no picture at all, he said, and Polis “should be ashamed of himself.” That June, Trump’s team donated a replacement, a painting based on his official photograph.
Weisberg carried the argument onto television as well, appearing on MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” on September 14. Host Jonathan Lemire argued that Bush’s voice “would have had enough weight to maybe convince others in the Republican party,” then added of the former president: “But yet Bush stayed silent.”
A Fresh Trump Jab at Bush World
Friction between Trump and the Bush orbit resurfaced on Monday, September 14. Trump wrote on Truth Social that day that Karl Rove, a former White House adviser to Bush, is bad for the Republican Party and frequently wrong. Rove suffers from a major case of what he called Trump Derangement Syndrome, Trump said, dating the grievance to nearly a decade of beating back the causes Rove championed, and he asked why Fox News and The Wall Street Journal keep his voice alive, calling him “a stone cold loser.” Bo French, a Republican candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, had drawn a vow from Rove that he would vote Democratic in order to cast a ballot against him, describing French as a bigot; Trump’s post followed. French’s opponent is Democrat Jon Rosenthal.
A full-time critic is not what Weisberg wants Bush to be, and he said nobody expects ex-presidents to respond to every development. Bush’s quiet, though, belongs to a specific category of failure in his telling. “There’s sins of commission and sins of omission,” Weisberg told Calderone, putting Bush’s reluctance to criticize Trump publicly in the second column. He tied that silence to Trump having “dismantled USAID,” the agency that helped run PEPFAR, the global HIV/AIDS program Bush launched.
Not everyone is persuaded by the Bush chapter. Russ Smith of Splice Today published pushback on September 16 in a piece titled “George W. Bush Takes a Long Breather,” calling Weisberg’s case about the 43rd president unconvincing, while allowing that Weisberg, unlike many of his peers, is not overly obnoxious in print about his dislike of Trump.
As for the canvas, Weisberg says Bush keeps it exactly where he has always kept it: out of sight.
